Monday, February 02, 2009

Last week I mentioned a couple of interviews that had tweaked my interest in a solution for automatically creating a printed "newspaper" of individual blog postings that I wanted to devote more time to. Clint Lalonde left a comment suggesting FeedJournal, so I went to take a peek, and it's almost perfect for what I want to do. FeedJournal allows you to subscribe to any RSS feed(s) and then spits out a nicely formatted PDF for you to read. You can specify the number of columns and whether it's justified or not - looks pretty good. But I didn't want to subscribe to entire feeds - just individual posts. Well, the tool's author suggests subscribing to a specific tag within Google Reader; any other filtering mechanism should work as well. Last step for me though is that the RSS reader I use on my iPhone doesn't allow me to re-tag articles, so I decided to just grab the feed for my shared items, which I then fed to FeedJournal and voila!

Except I don't want to have to visit FeedJournal each time I want to generate my "newspaper", and FeedJournal doesn't have any scheduling options. Well, they do with a different version of the product that costs $59/month.

So I found this comparison of FeedJournal of Tabbloid, an HP project (isn't that brilliant for a printer company?) Does the same thing as FeedJournal, though with fewer options for customization. But it allows me to schedule delivery of the PDF created by the feed I gave them. I just received the first delivery, so it seems to work well! oops, except it has all the items in the feed, not just the most recent. No problem, I just printed the first few pages, and perhaps the next delivery will only include new stuff.

Ellyssa Kroski has an article that 's just been published in School Library Journal titled That's Infotainment, and it provides a really good overview of the current state of screencasting, with the following topics covered: What is screencasting?, Web site tours, Library functions, Software and database training, Slideshow screencasts (slidecasts), Staff training, Student assignments, Hardware, Software, The process, Distribution, Fast Tips, and More Resources.